Flicking through the television sports channels yesterday morning, I came across the Red Bull air race series, with the latest heat run out of Detroit. Fantastic. In terms of sheer skill and eye-popping adrenalin entertainment, this race takes a lot of beating. It makes Formula 1 motor racing, for example, look positively tame, even though I have no doubt that the actual skills involved have a fair amount in common. For a start, the pilots will sometimes pull a G-force of up to 8 or 9 times, which is the sort of thing you associate with astronauts or jet fighter pilots, for which there is a need to wear a pressue suit to stop blacking out.
The race series is continuing in London soon. I am going to find out if I can get my hands on any tickets. It could be difficult.
Apologies if there is no link here – I am having a problem with this function today. A quick Google will bring it up: check out the great photos.
I went last year. It was impressive for the first hour or so, then it got boring.
Still worth going to if you haven’t been before though.
I saw this in London last year. It was a lot of fun and very well presented. I suppose the time trial format was quite repetitive but I found the close competition between pilots stopped it from getting boring.
The rocket racing league is supposed to fly a 3 ship demonstration race at Oshkosh this year…